Why de-proscribing Hamas is the right political choice
JVL Introduction
Jonathan Cook has produced a long, detailed and extremely cogent argument as to why the British government should accept the case put forward by UK lawyers appealing for Hamas to be de-proscribed – both its political and its armed wing.
Cook is at great pains to state that nothing he has written should be interpreted as support for Hamas or defence of war crimes its operatives may have committed. Of course the same applies to the editors of this blog. Such disclaimers are made necessary by the fact that being proscribed, it is virtually impossible to say anything about Hamas without risking criminal charges potentially carrying severe sentences.
Let Jonathan Cook explain why this is so wrong.
NWI
This article was originally published by Middle East Eye on Thu 1 May 2025. Read the original here.
Why I wrote an expert report against the UK classing Hamas as a terror group
Predictably, the British establishment is vilifying lawyers trying to end the proscription of Hamas’ political as well as armed wing. The lawyers have good arguments. So why is no one listening?
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During WW2 would the French resistance fighters have been labelled a terrorist organisation? After all they were occupied by the Hitler-driven German Army. They were occupied just like the Palestinians, and they had a right to take up arms, just like Hamas, to defeat their occupiers as they were fighting for a cause which we agreed with. Just because Starmer, and seemingly the rest of the world, doesn’t seem to agree with liberating the Palestinians from the murdering IDF. Like the French Resistance Movement they don’t have an army, airforce or navy either. Who’s right here? The French resistance Movement fighting against their occupation by Germany, or Hamas’s resistance against Netanyahu’s occuping army, airforce and navy?
If ever some of Hamas could have been described as “terrorists”, many or most are now clearly freedom fighters, resisting the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocidal acts that have seen hundreds of illegal, Jewish-Zionist-ONLY colonies establish in Occupied Palestine over decades since 1967.
(US) Christian Zionist / Evangelical-backed Jewish, Zionist, Israeli colonists in the already-settled Palestine are the real terrorists
Cook does indeed rightly refer to the UK as a police state in progress. A state of affairs, greatly to be attributed by the Zionist influence on UK policy-making. That the UK is not the only country “under the influence” of the Zionist settler-colonial enterprise, is being proven by the way, the USA is bending/bowing/breaking to the Zionist demands : see the sinister Project Esther of the ultra-Christian-Zionist Heritage Foundation, to understand how this geo-political enterprise has been organised these days. This practise of dictating donor-countries how to act towards dissent against the process of Umvolkung, has a long history.
The nucleus of the problem is that the dominant perspective of Christian and Jewish Zionists does behold Palestinians as trespassers of “Jewish territory”.
If the Palestinians would be considered the owners of their own country “from the river to the sea” – as we should – then organisations as the PLO and Hamas would be fully legitimate resistance-fighters against a brutal invading and occupying FOUREIGN POWER. When we do consider Palestinians as the rightful owners of their own country, then the UN does allow them to use force to not only resist that foreign entity, but to apply ALL means at their disposal, to remove that hostile entity FROM their territory.
What we have seen until now, is that Jewish and Christian Zionists have been turning this situation 100% around, by (illegitimately) claiming the Right to use brute force in order to cleanse the (autochthonous) Palestinians from their (Palestinian) territory.